What's up, everyone?

This is Cortland from NDHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.

On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.

How do they get to where they are today?

How do they make decisions, both with their companies and in their personal lives, and what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal here, as always, so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to build our own successful businesses. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with Daniel Gross. Daniel is not only a partner at Y Combinator, but also the head of artificial intelligence there.

He's a YC alumnus himself, having started a search engine called Q, which was acquired by Apple in 2013. He's an angel investor and a number of startups whose names you'd recognize. Curiously, he's roommates with my bosses, Patrick and John Collison, the founders of Stripe, so we'll be sure to talk about that. and most recently, Daniel is the founder of what we're here to talk about today, a new company called Pioneer.

Daniel, welcome to the Indiacers podcast, and thank you so much for coming on.

Of course, yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm a listener and delighted to finally be a participant in it.

You have described Pioneer as a search engine for finding great people. Can you tell us a little bit about what that means and why you decided to create it? Yeah, sure. It may make sense to

start with my story. So I'm originally from Jerusalem, Israel. I grew up, I grew up leading a very

different life from the one I'm leading now. It was raised as an

Orthodox Jew and I was always into computers and was always building things, but had no idea

that I would end up in Silicon Valley. And my life really changed due to a very small, seemingly

silly intervention, which is when I was getting ready to go to the Israeli

Army, I kind of very haphazardly filled out an application to Y Combinator.

And this is way back when in 2010, it wasn't really well known at the time.

And it was kind of a seen as a weird kind of West Coast activity that you might do.

And I remember filling out the application,

you know, tethered to my old Nokia phone,

waiting for the, you know,

bites to get sent over GSM or whatever,

not really thinking much of it.

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